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[Arx]

"The poor are getting crushed by lack of jobs we must act now". Said nobody.

...said very many people, actually? Unemployment is a huge problem here.

[Bohandas]

Kinda underestimating how bad things could get though. It sounds like this strategy requires things to get so bad there is a revolution. And look at places in Africa/Latin America where huge numbers of children are living in rubbish tips, scavenging for a living, yet people still aren't rebeling.

"The poor are getting crushed by lack of jobs we must act now". Said nobody.

Eventually there will be so few low level jobs there will be no one to manage. Management will become obsolete and it will cascade from there.

[Levi]

Idea 16:  Cover the north-pole in tarps.  It will prevent the ice beneath it from melting, thus preventing the ocean levels from rising.  Also will provide much needed employment in the tarp industry.  Occasionally when snow has built up to a certain level on the tarps, you can cover it in more tarps in an iterative ice-cap repair scheme.

For fun I decided to check how feasable this is.  15$ per square meter of tarp.  Arctic Ice Cap is 13.62 million kilometers in size.  This works out to costing about 200 billion dollars.    Um, maybe a bit more to get people to lay them out too, but lets hand-wave that.

Sounds a bit crazy, but it looks like the US military budget for 2012 was about 600 billion.  So if we can just convince the amercians to shut down their military for a year, we could cover the arctic in tarps 3 times!  Fooking global warming SOLVED.     Well, until we have to start covering antarctica anyway.

----

Idea 23:  Insert the gene responsible for dwarfism into all future embryos.  In a few generations, we'll have doubled the amount of space available and halved the amount of food needed for humanity.

[Levi]

Idea 24:  Any time a baby is born, the government puts 5000$ into an index fund.  After 70 years the money(~150,000) is used to fund an old age pension.

Idea 25:  Take 1/5 of Saskatchewan and offer it to Palestine in exchange for their land.  If they accept, give that land to Isreal.  Rename the new land to Saskatchestine.

Idea 26:  Start large scale funding and production of artificial diamonds.  Airdrop the diamonds all over the place to make diamonds worthless, thus ending the blood diamond trade.

[Aklyon]

Levi, you should make a list.

[Levi]

Hee hee.

Idea 27:  Any time a baby is born, the government puts $5000 into an index fund.  After 70 years the money(~150,000) is used to pay off that persons portion of the national debt.

Doing the math, this would cost Canada about 2 billion per year (healthcare is about 200 billion per year for comparison).  The average Canadian's personal share of national debt is currently about $18,000, so even with 70 years of inflation and government bungling would likely be under 150,000.

Bam, just solved national debt.

Edit:  Fixed a few numbers, now where is my Nobel prize?

[Bohandas]

Idea 26:  Start large scale funding and production of artificial diamonds.  Airdrop the diamonds all over the place to make diamonds worthless, thus ending the blood diamond trade.

I like the way you think. Hell, even if the blood diamond trade wasn't a thing I'd still support this idea because I hate jewelry too (now if there was a way to do this with gold)

[Zangi]

Idea 26:  Start large scale funding and production of artificial diamonds.  Airdrop the diamonds all over the place to make diamonds worthless, thus ending the blood diamond trade.

I like the way you think. Hell, even if the blood diamond trade wasn't a thing I'd still support this idea because I hate jewelry too (now if there was a way to do this with gold)

Some people don't like fake things.  Diamonds will still be worth just as much.

[TempAcc]

Build a massive solar panel power plant grid over the saara and find a decent way to maintain it without wasting infinite money + develop better tech for distributing energy over large distances and apply it to said grid. = energy crisis solved.

[wierd]

Short sighted.  Humans see resources, humans USE resources. End of story--- especially when said resources are considered so cheap as not to consider expendable.

Take for instance, modern software's proclivity to be less than efficient with memory use and alignment.  "RAM is Cheap! Developer time is expensive!" is the mantra.

If you make energy cheap like that, you wont have energy efficient devices, for exactly the same reasons.

[TempAcc]

Well, solar farms are kind of a thing already. The problem is that they cause some rather unfortunate side effects on the immediate environment, such as SETTING BIRDS ON FIRE and needing to be build on flat ground thats exposed to sunlight for most of the year, but our technology is becoming more and more efficient at turning solar energy into usable power, and with batteries becoming more reliable and sophisticated, energy will become easier to obtain.

Also, there are quite feasible systems that can be implemented in people's homes to produce and store usable energy already, the problem is that they're usualy expensive so most working class people dont have access to them, but now there's stuff like the Tesla Powerwall being released soon, which, depending on the environmental conditions, can give a house a good level of energy independence, to the point it can even be completely disconnected from an external energy grid for extended periods of time.

I mean, yes, people will always want more and more energy to use as it gets cheaper, but hey, allowing people to have their own ways of extracting energy from the sun is a step in the right direction in my book.

[Graknorke]

Short sighted.  Humans see resources, humans USE resources. End of story

Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.   

@Tarp: The ice caps reflect sunlight though, covering them over would prevent that and speed up warming.
@Artificial Diamonds: Diamonds are already pretty low value, their price is just inflated by monopoly power.

[wierd]

Not if the tarps are white.

[Graknorke]

Well then shit we might as well tarp a whole lot more than just the poles. Tarp the mountains, tarp the deserts, tarp a decent portion of Eurasia...

I think we have solved global warming.

[Bohandas]

Idea 26:  Start large scale funding and production of artificial diamonds.  Airdrop the diamonds all over the place to make diamonds worthless, thus ending the blood diamond trade.

I like the way you think. Hell, even if the blood diamond trade wasn't a thing I'd still support this idea because I hate jewelry too (now if there was a way to do this with gold)

Some people don't like fake things.  Diamonds will still be worth just as much.

Don't tell anyone they're synthetic. If necessary set up a fake mine. It's not like they're gonna be able to tell the difference given that there is no difference, being exacfly the same chemical.

Take for instance, modern software's proclivity to be less than efficient with memory use and alignment.  "RAM is Cheap! Developer time is expensive!" is the mantra.

Oh  man, that practice pisses me off so much. Computers are so much more advanced now but I still can't run too many programs at once because the programming is shit. It's excusable from Bay12, but it's not excusable from companies that have more than one programmer and charge an assload of money for very simple simulations.